Disobedient Asante shall die, but Okomfo Anokye will live forever! A Note on an Asante Eschatological Response to the Mystery of Death

Abstract

Emanating from the contexts of history, cultural studies, and religious studies, this work explores oral history about Okomfo Anokye, the legendary priest of the Asante people, to investigate the meaning and representation of death within the milieu of indigenous Asante cosmology. The Asante are an aboriginal group, within the larger Akan ethnic group, in Ghana, West Africa. Asante became a polity in the second half of the seventeenth century and a supreme West African chiefdom by the end of the eighteenth century. The confederacy started under two leaders – Osei Tutu, the first chief, and Okomfo (Priest) Anokye, the spiritual advisor and high priest. These “almost apotheosised” men used pragmatic politics, diplomacy and magico-religious means to engineer an Asante history, culture, and national image. Moreover, Okomfo Anokye’s legendary mystic-magician personae inscribed in Asante oral history and traditions certain myths for the explanation of the mystery of life and death. Renowned African philosophers such as Danquah, 1 Wiredu 2 and Gyekye, 3 have discussed Asante and Akan philosophical responses to death. Conversely, this essay explores Asante conceptions and rationalisation of death within the context of an Okomfo Anokye-centred and inspired myth. This study will unpack the narrative of this indigenous myth and present a hermeneutics of inner ideas therein which enable Asante to personify death, interpret its pervasiveness and invincibility, and explain physical expiration of bodily (transient) life as an inevitable transit into another type of life, the spiritual. This showcases an indigenous people’s contribution to the larger discourse on humankind’s attempt to deal with the reality of death.